`Mizlansky' Tweaks Hollywood

Steven Winn, Chronicle Staff Critic

Published 4:00 am, Monday, September 21, 1998

RATING: POLITE APPLAUSE

MIZLANSKY/ZILINSKY OR "SCHMUCKS": Comedy. By
Jon Robin Baitz
. Directed by
John McCluggage
. (Through October 11. At the
San Jose Repertory Theatre
, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose. Tickets: $16-$32. Call (408) 291-2255.)
They made films like "Hitler's Niece" and "LSD Mama Detective," but now those tawdry glory days are behind them. For the two prickly, irresistible B-movie scoundrels on the slide in "Mizlansky/Zilinsky or 'schmucks,' " one last deal is cooking.

Jon Robin Baitz's keen satire of Hollywood bad manners opened the San Jose Repertory Theatre season over the weekend. This uneven comedy also wants to be a morality play, about standing up for principles in an unprincipled world. Most of all, and most successfully, it's an occasion for a fine, funny and touching acting duet for two men wedded to each other's past. The plot turns on Mizlansky's skill in getting Zilinsky to play along.

The first half of the evening belongs to Davis Mizlansky, a Hollywood hack who's peddling tax shelters to a consortium of Oklahoma doctors. The scheme: recorded Bible stories for the K-Mart crowd that have just enough profit potential to keep the IRS at bay.

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In the role played by Nathan Lane in the New York premiere, Mel Brooks look-alike Larry Block is a fuming little fireplug of hostility and self-revelation. Arms waving and eyes bulging as he roams his Coldwater Canyon showplace (a severe LA-style design by R. Eric Stone), Mizlansky spars with ex- wives on his speakerphone, berates a snide gay assistant (Vidal Perez) and baits the hook for a fading television star (J. Michael Flynn) he needs to sell the Oklahoma doctors on the $10 million deal.

Mizlansky is a brash vulgarian with a line on everything from the Bible to Hollywood stars, whom he despises because "they need special water, they seduce your kids." Mizlansky freely concedes his tax shelter deal lives in "a gray area," but there's a baseline honesty about him that cuts through the bluster.

"I didn't go into this to be a crook," he tells another party to his scheme (Jackson Davis). The line's disarming because he has nothing to gain by it. Mizlansky may be a born liar, but there's not a sentimental, self-aggrandizing bone in him.

The play's best scene, its funniest and most scarring, comes when Zilinsky (Peter Van Norden) arrives from New York at the top of the second act. Tall and elegantly professorial to his partner's gold chain- and-loud shirt look, Zilinsky is a a jumble of intellectual pretensions, high moral seriousness, self-interest and sartorial flourish. He boasts about his psychiatrist, excoriates Mizlansky for their troubles with the IRS and preens in the green suede Oxfords he bought in Tokyo.

Van Norden, a memorable Henry -- Kissinger in the Rep's "Nixon's Nixon," is the perfect pseudo-suave foil for his partner. The whole psychodynamic history of their partnership gets telegraphed in the way Mizlansky picks up Zilinsky's book like a rotting fish. "You make me feel like a horrible little illiterate troll," he shouts, then supplies Zilinsky with the killer epithet: "Park Avenue Jewish WASP."

The shouting may be all that's left of the Milanzky/Zilinsky business, but it's got to be played out in one last fiasco. The adept Bruce French, as a front man for the Oklahoma doctors, provides the fuel. When he lets an anti-Semitic remark slip, all hell breaks loose.

Neither the play nor John McCluggage's unsteadily cast pro duction seems fully convincing in the last movement. There's a feel of something trumped up to put the idea of personal morality in high relief. Baitz, whose moral preoccupations can either be dramatic ("The Substance of Fire") or doctrinaire ("Three Hotels"), falls somewhere in between in this expansion of a 1984 one-act.

The two producers, fittingly, get the last scene to themselves. It's a small quiet coda that both men rec ognize as their last conversation before one of them goes off to face the music and the other wriggles free. Block and Van Norden find the exhaustion, hatred, grudging respect and the glimmer of fellow soul- mates in the scene.

They're through, sitting over an unopened bag of doughnuts at the L.A. farmers' market, but they'll never be finished with each other. "Mizlansky/Zilinsky" ends with one last, teasingly inconclusive deal.

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